[music]
Magruder: The track we're going to talk about today is the ICESat-2 flight over the Great Bahama Bank. This is interesting
because you might notice the really strong returns from beneath the surface of the water.
Although this is a pretty shallow area--about ten
meters or 30 feet deep--the signal is quite strong, just as
strong as from the surface of the water. The reason that is there’s a lot of limestone
in the deposits there, and it’s highly reflective. So ICESat-2
gets a lot of reflected photons back from those laser shots.
So ICESat-2 provides bathymetric measurements. And what that means is
measurements beneath the surface of the water, so we can map the topography
underwater. Which is really important when you think about studying coral reefs
or fish habitats or just sedimentation.
Or how the topography under the water moves for storm surge modeling.
It’s a really important measurement that usually we make from aircraft
that can only cover small areas. [music]